Legal Commentary

What Do You Think About the Idea of E-mail Office Hours?

Posted on September 22, 2010
When I went to college (1995-1999) and law school (2000-2003), I never considered e-mailing a professor a question about a class. Rather, I would come up to the professor after class or stop by during the professor's office hours. When I started teaching (2007), I received some questions via e-mail, but the vast majority of student questions came from students after class or during office hours...

How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger

Posted on September 22, 2010
I would like to recommend a book by my colleague Diane Mazur at the University of Florida Levin College of Law that could not be more timely. The book is called A More Perfect Military: How the Constitution Can Make Our Military Stronger. Here are the links to the book, with descriptions, advance praise, and so forth.

Florida DCA strikes law barring adoption by parent who is gay

Posted on September 22, 2010
Here is the decision. Florida's Third District Court of Appeal struck down Florida Statute 63.042(3), which bars any person who is homosexual from adopting. Significantly, the statute prohibited adoption by homosexual men and women, while allowing adoption on a case-by-case basis by people with criminal records or histories of substances abuse...

The Habeas Scorecard Doesn't Matter--Except When It Does?

Posted on September 21, 2010
Lurking just behind the scenes in our ongoing debate over the Graham bill is a deeper conversation with regard to the importance and significance of habeas review in the Guantanamo detention cases. This appeared to culminate two weeks ago with my and Ben's exchange over the so-called habeas "scorecard," and the meaningfulness (or not) of the percentage of post-Boumediene cases in which the detainees have prevailed on the merits...

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Dean Searches and Head Hunters

Posted on September 21, 2010
The Faculty Lounge has posted a list of law faculties which are undergoing a dean search this year. Some of them (although as far as I can tell not a majority) of these schools, including my own school, University of San Diego, have hired a consulting firm to assist in the search...

Student Evaluation Forms Have Too Many Questions: Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, or Strongly Disagree?

Posted on September 21, 2010
In a previous post, I cited to anecdotal data showing that the percentage of students completing student evaluations has sharply decreased as schools have switched from paper and pencil evaluations to their online counterparts. The post also noted that one of the main reasons why schools have switched to online evaluations is because they are so much more efficient than older evaluation systems in which administrators had to compile results by hand or at least combine results after running evaluations through Scantron machines...

The Invisible Side of the Judicial Bed

Posted on September 20, 2010
On occasion we all wake up grumpy (or grumpier than usual). We?re a touch more critical, a pinch more pessimistic, a bit less filled with neighborly love. Sometimes coffee and carbohydrates restore our spirits; other times an internal scowl lingers. As a result, minor decisions?e...

Talent Wants to Be Free

Posted on September 20, 2010
Imagine an academic world with no lateral hiring. Not much to counteract the moral hazard embedded in job tenure. For some, scholarly productivity and teaching performance will remain constant. These are people whose motivation is completely de-coupled from the external rewards of outside recruitment...

The Graham Bill and Detention Authority: U.S. Citizens and Material Support

Posted on September 19, 2010
In last Sunday?s post, I attempted a relatively comprehensive critique of the Graham bill (S. 3037), which is supposedly designed to (1) codify existing practices in the post-Boumediene habeas litigation; and/or (2) provide clearer substantive, evidentiary, and procedural rules for courts to follow in these cases...

The Writing Sweet Spot

Posted on September 17, 2010
We?ve all experienced being in the writing ?zone.? Crisp phrasing comes easily; arguments fall into a near-musical pattern; the brain crackles, the keyboard dances, and beautiful publishable text is produced in an intense outburst so enveloping that time evaporates...

Can Good Prawfs Be Mensches? And some excuses, apologies, and such.

Posted on September 17, 2010
I've been a bit overwhelmed on the domestic front lately between work and non-work stuff to be able to engage meaningfully online on various issues. I've been derelict in writing my response to the wonderful contributions from Professors Harbach, MacDowell and Sack on the blog the other day about Privilege or Punish...

Women and Disaster

Posted on September 17, 2010
As I mentioned in a previous post, disaster harm depends upon the vulnerability of particular groups of people and therefore implicates questions of social justice. Part of the difficulty in developing a comprehensive response to disaster, however, is that social vulnerability is a complex phenomenon...

How Do You Grade Exams? Exam by Exam or Question by Question (i.e. Exam Hopping)?

Posted on September 16, 2010
Yesterday, there was an interesting discussion at a faculty brown bag lunch I attended. The topic of discussion was how law professors grade exams. Assuming that you give an essay exam with more than one question, you have two options: (1) You can read student A's exam in its entirety, assign a score, move on to student B's exam, do the same, move on to student C's exam, etc...

Law School Hiring Thread, 2010-11, Thread Two

Posted on September 16, 2010
NB: This thread will be moved to the front every ten days or so. This thread is for both law professors and people who are on the market this coming year for becoming a law professor. We invite those on the market and those who are prawfs to leave comments (anonymously if they prefer) regarding: a) whether they have received a first round interview at a school, and if the school mentioned the areas they were looking into, and whether the interview offer was accepted b) a callback from a law school and/or accepted it and c) whether they have...

Family Ties Burdens from a Family Law Perspective

Posted on September 15, 2010
First, many thanks to Dan, who originally convened this group to discuss Privilege or Punish at last summer?s SEALS Conference. I congratulate Jennifer, Ethan, and Dan on their work, and thank them for its many contributions. And thanks, too, to the folks here at Prawfs for giving us a forum in which to continue our conversation...

Emily Sack on Privilege or Punish

Posted on September 15, 2010
The following comments are from Emily Sack, who teaches at Roger Williams: The authors of Privilege or Punish have made an extremely valuable contribution to the discussion of the family?s treatment in criminal law. In particular, the framework they have developed for analyzing the value of specific family ties benefits or burdens is very helpful in moving the conversation forward...

Privilege or Punish Book Club (SEALS version): Elizabeth MacDowell (UNLV)

Posted on September 15, 2010
I?m delighted to continue this discussion about Dan Markel, Jennifer M. Collins, and Ethan J. Leib?s important and provocative book, Privilege or Punish? Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties, with some of my co-panelists from the SEALS Workshop on Criminal Law and the Family...

"Privilege or Punish": A Prawfs/SEALS Book Club

Posted on September 15, 2010
It is my pleasure to introduce a book club on "Privilege or Punish: Criminal Justice and the Challenge of Family Ties." The participants are following up on their discussion of criminal justice and the family at this year's SEALS conference. Joining us will be: Meredith Harbach, University of Richmond School of Law Elizabeth MacDowell, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, William S...

Should Tenure Committees Solicit Outside Teaching Reviews Like They Solicit Outside Scholarship Reviews?

Posted on September 15, 2010
Law schools traditionally conduct outside scholarship reviews when professors go up for tenure. For instance, at my school, the tenure committee selects two professors from other law schools and the professor-up-for-tenure selects one professor to review the candidate's scholarship and write a "tenure letter" to the committee assessing that scholarship...

A Surreply to Ben Wittes on the Graham Bill

Posted on September 14, 2010
Not surprisingly, my rather harsh criticism of the Graham bill in this post from Sunday morning has provoked a series of reactions from its defenders over at Lawfare (for what it's worth, this is my favorite thing about blogging--meaningful substantive disagreements fleshed out over time)...

Michael Bloomberg, Adventure Outdoors, Bob Barr, and Libel

Posted on September 14, 2010
Former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr is representing a gun dealer suing New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for libel. The gun dealer, Adventure Outdoors, was named in a public nuisance suit brought by the City of New York against a number of dealers to stop "straw-person sales...

ASU's Aspiring Law Professor Conference

Posted on September 14, 2010
A very special thank you to Dan for letting me sneak a post on the blog. Just wanted to remind all the aspiring law professors out there to come to ASU's second annual Aspiring Law Professor Conference. Not only will you get the skinny on the hiring process, but you can also sign up to do a practice job talk or interview...

Disaster Law and Social Justice

Posted on September 14, 2010
I write about disaster law and policy and have a few projects cooking that I may share with you over the next few weeks. My overarching goal is to identify a normative legal framework that can guide efforts to fortify communities before and to rebuild after disaster...

Why Governments Use Social Media and Why They Should

Posted on September 13, 2010
Lately, I've been exploring whether public forum doctrine may impede desirable governmental uses of interactive social media. As part of that project, I'm examining both government incentives to use social media and citizen interests implicated by government social media use...

Mid-Semester Evaluations: Yay or Nay?

Posted on September 13, 2010
In a post last week, I cited to an article discussing the decreasing percentage of students completing student evaluations as schools switch to online evaluation systems. One way that some professors have tried to circumvent this decrease is through the mid-semester student evaluation, discussed on here by Verity Winship in October 2008...

The Case Against the Graham Bill

Posted on September 12, 2010
Looming in the background of the ongoing conversation over the appropriate way forward on detention (both at Guantánamo and elsewhere) is S. 3707 (the ?Terrorist Detention Review Reform Act,? better known as the Graham bill), introduced last month and framed as one of the most comprehensive attempts yet at legislative resolution (or at least clarification) of many of the recurring issues in the post-Boumediene habeas litigation...

Clerkships right after graduation: a dying trend?

Posted on September 12, 2010
According to a recent post on Concurring Opinions by Dave Hoffman (http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2010/09/the-quickly-unraveling-clerkship-market.html), the "law clerk hiring plan" is unraveling--fewer and fewer clerkships are being filled via this system...

9/11 and Me

Posted on September 11, 2010
My personal connection to 9/11 follows, but to summarize: (1) I was in Manhattan that morning and watched one tower fall through a midtown office window; (2) I worked for the plaintiff-side firm that led the consolidated wrongful death litigation arising from the attacks; (3) only several months before 9/11, I considered an alternate professional opportunity that would have changed my life -- and probably ended it...

Sound and fury, signifying nothing

Posted on September 11, 2010
So, after all that, Terry Jones now swears he and his followers will not burn the Koran, today or ever. Of course, he came to that conclusion after being promised a meeting with the people behind the new Muslim cultural center--meaning he has been elevated as an important voice in this (silly) public debate, as I had feared...

Expression v. Expressive Manner: More on burning the Koran

Posted on September 10, 2010
Jack Balkin comments on Rev. Terry Jones's planned Koran-burning ritual this weekend (Update: Which may not occur after all this noise--or not--depending). Much of Jack's piece is an explanation of why book-burning is constitutionally protected, in keeping with what he calls the "economy of speech" and the belief that "approval and disapproval of speech in the public sphere ...

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